An Interview with Roger Gabriel of bitINKA

Roger Gabriel has four years of experience working in a financial division of IBM in Argentina and 5 years working on e-commerce businesses. He is launching a Bitcoin trading platform that is easy enough for anyone in South America to use.

Ruben Alexander: How did you get started with Bitcoin?

Roger Gabriel: On bitcoin itself around July of last year, I read a lot about the currency and it intrigued me. Made my first purchase of around 0.25 BTC and just held it on a wallet. On developing a platform around November of last year, I had purchased several coins and made some profit [and] I wanted to invest that on a bitcoin related business.

What would be your advice to other Bitcoin investors when searching for a company to support?

To investigate the product, if the company/product could make a difference and not just be another exchange. Mt. Gox went down and tons of companies are fighting to replace that hole, but no one is doing what we are trying to do [which] is make a difference with bitcoin on a daily basis.

We are trying to integrate bitcoin on the current financial world to make a difference.

Basically, how everyday users can benefit from bitcoin not just bitcoin followers.

Do you recommend that Bitcoin investors focus their efforts outside of the US? If so, why?

Yes as previously mentioned based on what we are doing, using bitcoin in countries like Argentina and Venezuela where there are currency exchange restrictions bitcoin falls right into place. On our product you will see how we employ bitcoin to satisfy this demand, created by local governments.

What has been your experience in getting Peruvians to use Bitcoin?

[The] Bitcoin movement here in Peru just started. We are trying to get the attention of the local community by showing how easy bitcoin can fit on local finance when we explain our product, and for example we tell a cab driver how easy it could be for him to charge customers when they don’t want to pay cash: they immediately ask when is the product coming out.

If a bitcoin owner wanted to travel to Peru, what is one thing they should do and see?

It depends on how he wants to use Bitcoin, if just for tourism. Unfortunately right now we haven’t launched yet, and actually tourism is one of the target areas for our platform, so if they come here before December I would guess try selling it online.

What is your advice to Spanish speaking Bitcoin users who want to get more involved in the community?

This is a tough question since there are very little newspapers that are just based on bitcoin in Spanish, but the good thing is that since there is a lot of interest in bitcoin from bilingual users, there are tons of Facebook pages and Facebook groups – even a couple of pages that go ahead and translate important articles. Also they can go ahead and follow us on Facebook and we will have news on not only our product but [also] the LaTam Bitcoin Community.

Great question, but we don’t only target the Peruvian community but the community in South America. We will change the way micropayments are processed; I can even dare to say we will create a demand of our product in micropayments in Peru. We will show everyone a new method to send money to people in neighboring countries like Argentina and Venezuela and have both the sender and receiver benefit tremendously from using our product. We will educate the local community on how all of this is done using Bitcoin and make it simple.